Battery-powered Onewheel may be the future of personal transportation

Kyle Doerksen shows off the Onewheel transportation device he invented at his office at Future Motion in Santa Cruz, California, on Monday, Oct. 30, 2017. Onewheel is an electric powered board that rides on a single go-kart racing slick that gives the sensation of snowboarding on pavement or off road. (Gary Reyes/ Bay Area News Group)

Kyle Doerksen rides on the Onewheel transportation device he invented at his office at Future Motion in Santa Cruz, California, on Monday, Oct. 30, 2017. Onewheel is an electric powered board that rides on a single go-kart racing slick that gives the sensation of snowboarding on pavement or off road. (Gary Reyes/ Bay Area News Group)

SANTA CRUZ >> In his lumberjack shirt and jeans, Kyle Doerksen doesn’t cut the figure of the typical CEO, especially when he goes gliding down the wide hallways of the old Wrigley gum factory on his cool little Onewheel. He weaves this way and that like a 21st century Jetson, taking a long smooth ride on his e-vehicle.

It looks like a big old skateboard sitting atop one fat wheel.

Battery-driven and stocked with technology, it has a range of six to eight miles and can go up to 20 miles per hour. Doerksen, who invented the Onewheel and founded Future Motion, the company that builds it, believes it represents the new wave in personal mobility: “This is like the PC stage of transportation,” he says. “We’ve been on mainframes — cars — for generations. But we’re now seeing the development of all these niche transportation modes, like Onewheel.”

A Stanford-trained engineer who studied neuroscience as an undergraduate, Doerksen began working on his invention in 2008 in his Mountain View garage. A 2014 Kickstarter campaign raised $630,000 in three weeks and the first Onewheels hit the market late that year. In 2015, Doerksen moved his company to this reconstituted chewing gum factory, where the hallways are lined with startups designing everything from guitar straps to synthetic heart valves and electric bicycles.

Future Motion has raised $6.5 million in venture funding and sold “thousands” of Onewheels. It declines to disclose exact sales figures. At a cost of $1,499, the Onewheel — or Onewheel+, as the latest model is known — occupies the same general marketplace as electric bicycles and four-wheeled electric skateboards.

But that single fat wheel — the motor fits inside the hub — offers a continuous surface that helps generate a unique ride. Doerksen, who grew up in Calgary, not far from the Canadian Rockies, likens it to “snowboarding on powder, which for me is the ultimate feeling. It’s free, but it’s also forgiving. It’s like you’re riding on a pillow, and that kind of floaty feeling is what I wanted to create when I first started imagining this thing.”

A kind of worldwide cult has coalesced around the Onewheel. There’s a school near Bordeaux, France, that teaches Onewheeling: how to stay balanced, how to do tricks, how to ride over rough terrain. When Doerksen spoke last month at a conference in Paris on the future of mobility, he was greeted by a posse of Onewheelers. In Asheville, N.C., 80 Onewheelers recently held a festival replete with live music and a pig roast.

Future Motion says the Onewheel — by appealing to both a sport crowd and a commuting crowd — has found a wide audience, perhaps wider than originally expected. While touring a visitor through their Santa Cruz operation one recent afternoon, Doerksen and Jack Mudd, the company’s head of marketing and “chief evangelist,” began thinking about the ways Onewheel has surprised them.

“People who want to go ride trails — we hadn’t really thought about that,” said Mudd. “People commuting to work — we kind of thought of that.”

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“Off-roading,” replied Doerksen. “The first time we rode on sand at the beach our eyes were opened.”

The 35-year-old CEO then mentioned “people doing inter-modal journeys. Maybe you take it in your car when you go to work because the office is 10 blocks from where you park in San Francisco.”

Many mornings, Doerksen grabs his Onewheel — it weighs 24 pounds — and rides from his house to the office, gliding over the gravel trail beside the railroad tracks on Santa Cruz’s Westside. “It kind of rearranges your whole mentality about the day. It’s like snowboarding or surfing before you go to work.”

Onewheel users include people in their 60s who grew up as surfers or skateboarders and still crave getting up on some kind of board. There are also 20-something weekend warriors who use it to hit the trails after a week in the office. Techies in their 30s and 40s — especially those with families and young children — constitute the largest group, according to Mudd, because “they no longer have time for the grand adventures. This is a way to dip back into it.”

Ethan Ashley, an electrician who lives in San Francisco’s SoMa district, recently rode his Onewheel “to the gym in the Tenderloin. I just kind of jetted over there,” he said, “went to the bank, picked up some juice at the store. It’s hands-free, so I can have a coffee and keep riding uphill and go on Instagram or do my texts.”

He struck a note of caution, however: “I’ve been snowboarding since I was a kid, but the first time I went on the Onewheel, I fell off. To get good, to do really tight turns, it took me a month. I don’t push the speed limit too much.”

The warning rang true.

Stepping on the Onewheel, with Mudd offering a stabilizing hand, I struggled to maintain balance. The Onewheel seemed to sense that I was overthinking the situation. When I took a deep breath, relaxed and leaned forward, the Onewheel followed my lead. My balance improved. I gained speed, and even this 63-year-old — who’s never been into board sports — could see the possibilities.

The Onewheel’s early Kickstarter model was solely Doerksen’s invention. Now, he works with a team of engineers that has redesigned the motor and continually upgrades software to improve the board’s self-balancing function. The vehicle’s “brain” — its electronics — fit inside the board under the rider’s front foot, while the lithium iron phosphate battery is concealed beneath the rider’s back foot.

Future Motion refers to this customization as the “digital shaping” of the ride.

Viewed from the outside, it’s all very mysterious.

“People look at a Onewheel and they barely have any idea what’s going on,” Doerksen said. “You can barely see a motor. People see you cruising by and wonder how it’s happening. It looks impossible because it’s so improbable.”